Michaelmas Term Seminar Series 2010 - Dr Lars Gulbrandsen, 'Introduction to and Overview of Third Party Certification'.  Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Enacting the Ethical Consumer

The certification of products is not new. However, the past few years have seen an upsurge in consumer demand for much more information about the provenance, authenticity, and performance of products and services, going well beyond authenticity, safety and reliability. Alongside this rise there has been a proliferation of voluntary certification schemes instituted by various combinations of industry associations, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and government or quasi-governmental agencies.

The seminar series is designed as the first step of a project to compare newly emerging third party certification programmes. Drawing together scholarly and practitioner expertise on a variety of third party certification programmes, presentations will address issues such as the origins or inspiration for the certification programme, identification of participants, its structure, effectiveness and impacts (anticipated and unanticipated), and principal challenges of the certification scheme.